


stay steady now, newt

by comebacknow



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Divergent, Newt Lives, Other, Safe Haven, newtmas if you squint, sonyarriet if you REALLY squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:29:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28460178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comebacknow/pseuds/comebacknow
Summary: In the quiet of the Safe Haven, Newt learns to embrace peace.
Relationships: Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 50
Collections: Maze Runner Secret Santa 2020





	stay steady now, newt

**Author's Note:**

> For my secret santa giftee! I hope you enjoy this little window into the peacefulness of the safe haven. They all deserve some quiet now that it's all over. 
> 
> Thank you for requesting this!! Happy holidays!

Newt breaks the surface of the water and blinks his eyes open to the sun. It’s warm on his face, but the water is cool enough to dampen the heat. There hasn’t been heat like the Scorch. Not here in the Safe Haven.

There’s a breeze here now, even when the sun is bright above them. Come darkness, when the only light comes from a bright moon and brighter stars, the Haven becomes even cooler. Newt welcomes it. He spends his nights before bed listening to waves and feeling the way his muscles start to twitch. He likes the way a shiver runs up his spine in the cool air.

It’s strange to think of all they’d gone through. Sitting around one of the many campfires in the Safe Haven, Newt can’t help but think of how easy it was now. The previous year had been a constant push; he and the rest of their little group had spent the time always running – whether it was away from things or toward something else. Their days had been spent planning, gathering, backup-planning. Their days were spent surviving. It was over now, at least for them. Days would come when Scorchers or other Maze Kids would arrive panting, cut up with fear in their eyes. But sooner or later, they all faded down into the Safe Haven: done running and done hiding. Now all they needed was to learn how to stay and how to still themselves.

That’s something Newt is finding they can’t quite train for, but maybe it’s something they could just be.

There’s a quiet to the Safe Haven that Newt’s never really known before. Even the days back in the Glade, before everything changed, it was never a quiet like this. Those were days he missed. He missed the mornings sending the runners off, checking in with the slicers and cooks, and rounding it off with the track hoes in the fields. Every afternoon, he’d check with the medjacks, baggers and builders. There was a routine to life in the Glade because it kept things running. It gave the boys a purpose at a time when they were lost.

Now, in the open space of the Safe Haven, away from being chased and hunted, he finds it’s somehow harder to pull together and start a new routine. It’s a different type of lost, but there’s safety in it this time that he doesn’t quite know how to work with.

Lately, it’s been skeletal. A broad outline of a routine. Waking up, heading to the shower blocks, meandering to the food tent. And then it’s left open from there.

Afternoons are spent in the water for Newt to cool off from the morning sun. Eventually this would shift to walking through the woods, flashes of the setting sun peeking through the slatted space between trees. Dinner is had around a campfire that mysteriously seems to appear in the evenings. (Of course, when asked, no one knew who seemed to set it up that night. “No, I did it yesterday.” “Fry said he was gonna do it today, but when he came out here it was already done.” And the next day, “No, it wasn’t me today. I did it last night.” Somehow, the campfires were always built, and somehow, no one was ever around to take credit for it the night of.)

After the campfire dinners, Newt would find himself wandering off again. It’s not like he was avoiding people. It’s just how life became here for the weeks following the war. They needed time together, time apart, and those days became weeks. Newt’s a year older and thinks about when the next stage of his life will come, or maybe if this is the beginning of it and that’s why he’s so caught up on trying to make something of it.

*

Newt pulls himself from his cot when he hears movement off to his right. He doesn’t need to look over to know who it is. Minho is still always the first one awake, but he hasn’t gone for a morning run in months now. It was jarring at first; Newt and Frypan would talk in hushed, worried whispers about it. It soon came apparent that Minho just didn’t need it anymore once he’d realized he was no longer running from anything, toward anything, or racing a clock. So, they stopped worrying and let it be. That was the first time they learned to do as such.

Still, old habits, and Minho wakes up at dawn every morning. These days, he doesn’t reach for his boots. Instead, he reaches for a journal he’s kept on the small wooden makeshift table. He grabs a pen and sets off. Every morning it’s somewhere different and Newt wonders if even Minho knows where he’ll end up to write. Maybe the point is that is doesn’t matter anymore; he’ll stop when he stops and he’ll find a new stop the next day. It’s become Minho’s own way to welcome the day, and similarly, the others have found their own ways.

Newt pulls himself from his cot and he begins his day the way he found comfort in. He walks past a still sleeping Thomas and pauses just briefly. Unlike Minho, Thomas sleeps late into the morning – sometimes not waking up until lunch is announced. The same as he did with Minho, Newt worried at first. But now he thinks this is a good thing; he thinks Thomas deserves to rest after it all.

Thomas has steady breaths that trail on over hours; his mouth parts over them sometimes, but mostly there’s nothing worrying about it. Newt learned this the first time he thought Thomas was having a panic attack in his sleep again. It hasn’t happened since the first few months they were here and Newt quickly learned that Thomas had just found a way to sleep comfortably. He doesn’t toss and turn like nights in the Scorch. He doesn’t burst awake and reach for a gun anymore. This, too, took months to unlearn – but that’s all they’ve been doing anyway. Unlearning.

So, when he _does_ see Thomas shift in his cot, he keeps himself from reaching forward to wake him up, to make sure he’s okay, to make sure he simply _is._ (Newt’s had his own nightmares and the thought of living them out still haunts him, but every morning he watches Thomas dream. And then he makes his way to the water.)

It’s here he usually finds Gally.

Gally isn’t quite a fan of the water so much as he likes the unsteadiness of it. Gally takes a small rowboat out – not far from the shore – but just enough where the waves will gently rock him while he lies beneath the sun. Newt asked him about it once.

“Don’t you get it?” he’d replied, eyes still closed and arms folded across his ribs. “You know what it was like to live surrounded by greenery, trees and land. To run through stone walls. You remember crossing a hot desert and hiding in underground bunkers. Don’t you remember? Running through a city that moved faster than we’d ever dreamed could exist? Technology and screeching train tracks and sirens? Why wouldn’t I want to spend my time somewhere warm and gentle instead?”

Gally doesn’t go in the water, though.

There were still questions, mysteries that went unsolved about their lives before The Maze. Like how Newt could swim for hours until the water got too cold or started to warm his fingertips. Like how Gally tried to swim once and didn’t quite make it as well as Newt did. He stays in the boat, once in a while resting his arm over the boat and letting his fingers trail the surface.

Some fears they were still unlearning.

Lunch is warm – especially after the mornings in the water. Vince, Jorge and two other adults run the food tent. They serve whatever they can scrounge up over time. Newt helps twice a week with growing crops, but mostly it’s just to pass time. That’s all they’re doing now, and this is familiar to him. He likes the way dirt feels beneath his fingertips. He likes how slowly things grow; thinks about the way they’re all growing at their own pace.

Lunch is warm – and not just in the way it’s cooked over fires. Thomas leaves his tent and sits bleary eyed next to Newt. His “hello” is more like a small sound as he presses his shoulder to Newt’s and rubs his fingers in his eyes. Sonya and Harriet join them for lunch. (Aris usually springs up to help the adults. He explained to Newt once how he never felt like he was much help, but here – where he didn’t have the scrap and claw his way through the Scorch with little to no memory – here, he could help. He enjoyed himself here, found a place where he could smile when others did.)

So, Harriet and Sonya join Newt and Thomas. They talk. It’s never about anything urgent, their words no longer come out in a long string with shaking or twisting hands. Instead, they point out clouds, they remember something that happened the day before, they ask each other how they’re feeling. It’s conversation that felt off around Newt’s tongue the first few weeks. He’d wondered why they’d waste time talking about a strange flower Sonya found, wondered why Harriet later found it and brought it to their cabin. It wasn’t until hours later, Sonya walking with him toward the woods.

She’d kept falling behind him and he’d have to stop to let her catch up. Other times, he’d have to double back to where she’d paused. She’d finally explained to him as she sat down in the middle of the woods. “It’s not wasting time anymore. It’s spending it, it’s living in it. Have you lived, yet, in the time that we’ve been given now that the war is over?”

And now lunch is had slowly. They take breaks between bites for conversation, for thoughts, for anything they want.

The woods are the quietest of spaces they have now, and he thinks that’s why he likes them so much. Some others avoid them. “It’s too close,” Frypan explained once. “I don’t like the way it reminds me of dark corners.” It’s all about unlearning.

Newt remembers the Glade’s corners. He remembers what they meant, but it was a comfort for him in the Glade and it’s a brighter comfort now. He lets his hands trail across bark as he passes the trees. He sees initials carved into some once in a while.

There are others in the Safe Haven, of course. _Scorchers_ they were dubbed at the beginning. People who were never placed in Mazes or experimented on. People who were just surviving and running in their own ways. People who never had their memories wiped and were able to mark things with initials. Last names weren’t common for a lot of them, but there were plenty of Scorchers that still remembered their own.

Sometimes, Newt would trace his fingers over the letters.

L. F.

R. S.

S. N.

He’d trace them and wonder what his own might be. Draw letters in the dirt between trees. They’re always different.

G. R.

T. M.

N. T.

He thinks he’ll give himself a last name one day, but he hasn’t quite found one that fits just yet.

He returns to a campfire already built. Hardly anyone asks anymore who set it up, but everyone’s always grateful it’s been done.

Newt wanders through small circles of people until he finds familiar faces. He takes the empty space next to Minho and listens as Aris speaks on the other side of him. He fills them in on a story he heard passed on through the food tent. A Scorcher found a family of otters on the other side of the woods. This wasn’t anything new now, of course. As time went on, they found all sorts of animals and plants. All sorts of life growing on around them. Vince, Aris and the Scorcher had gone over to bring them food. It was nothing world-changing, just some scraps of food they wouldn’t be using for meals. It was nothing that’s never been heard before in the last year or so, but Newt’s come to understand that maybe that was the point of no longer being hunted. It was finding a story, something to talk about, in the middle of the mundane and normality.

He’s sitting on the edge of the rocky jetty that evening, stomach full and eyes growing tired. His legs hang down and his hands are planted behind him against the cool stone. The air is briny, especially at night when the tide rises. He watches waves foam out in the sea and listens to the way the ocean seems to sigh heavily with each one. It becomes ambient as his thoughts escape him. He thinks of the otters and other animals who live in the water. The animals who deal with the higher tides at night, rushing above them. He wonders if that’s the only life those otters know, or if one day they’ll make their way to calmer waters, or if calmer waters will make it to them.

He wonders if he’ll watch the ocean at night and see different types of tides below the moon.

Newt leans further backwards and presses himself to the stone, closing his eyes to the night sky. Behind his eyelids, he can make out the basics. It’s a deep blue with specks of stars littered across it, but when he opens his eyes, he finds different patterns. He doesn’t know whether the stars stay the same or change every night – he’s never been in a position to learn about it – but he wonders if he can take the time to do so now.

The night sky is something that _is_ familiar to him. He remembers nights in the Scorch lying on hard sand staring above him and wondering if it’d be the last thing he sees.

Now, he closes his eyes, not needing to take in every detail because he knows it’ll be there the next day and the next.

It’s about unlearning.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there, but he opens his eyes when he hears footsteps beneath the yawning waves. He arches a bit and stretches his neck around to look behind him.

Thomas lifts a hand in a half-hearted wave and then comes to sit next to Newt. He lies back next to him and looks up. It’s here that they have their time to talk in whispers. It’s memories, usually. They talk about the things they were afraid to say all those times in the past, the fears they were afraid to speak into existence. There’s comfort in speaking them up to the darkness where they’ll get lost in the spaces between the stars.

Here, in the unfamiliarity of a world they’ve been slowly building over the year, Newt finds that Thomas has become his own type of night sky.

In the future, Newt will come to learn that it might be the way Thomas gives him light in darkness like the moon; Thomas creates a sort of gravitational pull that sends waves through Newt and bring him closer to him every time. It’s in the way Newt spends his first few minutes every day checking to see that Thomas is still peacefully asleep. It’s when lunch comes around and Thomas’ shoulder finds his immediately. It’s when Newt traces letters in the bark of the woods and wonders if he can make a last name with the letter T just to have reasons to draw it over and over. It’s around campfire circles and, mostly, it’s around evenings listening to the waves and waiting for the sound of Thomas’ boots.

For now, Newt thinks it’s just in the way that Thomas will be there even when his eyes are closed, the next day and the next. Sometimes, it’s about learning.


End file.
